Internet Explorer 8 beta arrives with two new features

I was just out and about overpaying for an oil change when I caught this video demo of Internet Explorer 8. The main focus of the video shows off two new IE8 features: activities and web slices. Activities looks like a nice way to get more info on a topic in ways ranging from news to maps to social networking. If you're reading about a movie for example and you want to see where it's playing locally, you can do so with an interactive pop-up Windows Live map. Web slices is akin to the Dashboard clipping feature in Safari 3 for Mac OS X. With it, you can monitor specific data on a web page and have a custom shortcut for easy retrieval. A nice feature, but I hope to see it get used outside of the browser; namely, as a custom Gadget for your Vista Sidebar.

As of around 30 minutes ago, the beta of IE 8 became available for Vista and XP SP2 right here so if you want a closer look at it, hop over and give it a download. Bear in mind, the preview is really geared for developers to examine how they can use the new features so don't be too hard on the browser if you run into issues.

Comments

[dean]

sorry wrong area... this is where my post belonged.. CRAQSH BANG BOOM! could not run on my HP DV2500. had to system restore!